In 1983, when the Historic National Trust decided to register the important local examples of the nation’s early American architecture, a committee was formed by local citizens and architectural experts. The resulting consensus was to create a National Historic District covering the entire Oley Township to preserve for posterity all the historic structures in this exceptional Native American canton. A recent photographic book, Oley Valley: A Photographic Journey (2013), by the Oley Valley Heritage Association is an in-depth study of local buildings and the people who inhabited this unusual rich farming valley of southeastern Pennsylvania, and the content in our Oley Valley Heritage: The Federal Years book provides worthy content.
Bread, the staff of life in provincial times, was more than a dietary staple and in many 18th century households of this bygone era, it was the main course, together with a potluck choice of stew invented by a talented Pennsylvania Dutch cook. Needless to state, bread baking was a serious craft together with churning butter, for both commodities were sent to market weekly to increase the family wealth besides feeding the immediate household. Perhaps the folklife practice of Old Order Amish and Mennonite farm women baking extra bread for their market and roadside stands of today is an outgrowth of this time-honored custom. Since most Oley Valley immigrants had entered America through the Port of Philadelphia, they were familiar with this dynamic world trading center (and Colonial capital) from where they continued to receive their imported domestic goods.
Previously heated by a wood fire, the brick-arched door opening to the hearth was called its mouth, into which passed a great variety of bake goods. Depending on the degree of retained heat, dough for bread was baked first, and then cakes and cookies last, etc. But lucky was the pioneer woman who had a bake oven built into the rear wall of her large kitchen walk-in fireplace, so she did not need to chance going outside with her raised bread dough to bake in the earlier type free-standing, frontier outside bake oven. However, if her yeast dough did not rise, it may be because she swept the kitchen floor on bake day, according to an ancient Pennsylvania Dutch dialect proverb collected by folklorist, Dr. Edwin Fogel in 1915, which upholds the Friday folkway ritual.
This baking task done routinely on Fridays, a Haus Frau (housewife) could sometimes count on extra company. Being any Christian German as Trexler’s wife (covered in an earlier article), Dutchwomen shared the miracle of bread baking with new peaceful Indian friends in the 18th century, believing in a benevolent coexistence. The Jacob Keim homestead, which dates from 1753, was also built at a time when Indians still lived in the Oley Valley. It had a large, separate bake house and also an earlier bake oven attached to the east wall of the small Keim stone cabin on the basement level. This Keim bake house, similar in style to the Deturk bakery facility, incorporated a vaulted ground root cellar, which is all that remains of the structure today although the integrity of the roof questionable, but most likely, the Keims and Deturks bartered some of their bread with the local Native Americans.
However, unlike quickly fashioned frontier homes built by the Scotch-Irish, sturdy Germanic homes and ancillary buildings with their clay tiled roofs and salmon brick arches built by our Rhinelander ancestors showed a commitment to America that these families were here to stay. Even though the lower Oley Valley was Swedish and Quaker English, when our PA Dutch immigrants reached the confines of the “Oley Hills” around Lobachsville, the many Rhineland orange clay tile roofs were unmistakably Germanic. The availability of clay that could be fired into earthen tile was abundant and perhaps by design played in very well for their French Huguenots, German and Swiss inhabitants, collectively known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the architecture of this Historic District.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
